Keeping Track of All Your Photos

Keeping Track of All Your Photos

How many places do you send photos in a day? Facebook, Twitpic, Instagram? Maybe others? Do you have a system for finding and tracking all those photos? Depending on the device you use to take the photo you may have only one option, or several options, on where to send the image.

Image by Virginia DeBolt

I've always used Flickr to store and organize photos. But sometimes lately the device I'm using when I take the photo won't send to Flickr. My options might be limited to only Twitter. The image above, for example, was sent in a Tweet and has a pic.twitter URL. Now I have bookmarks for Instagram photos, heaven only knows where to find twitpics, and what have I sent to Facebook? Really, how does one keep track of photos that are outside of the normal photo storage space?

There are websites available that help solve the problem of images scattered all over the Internet.

ThisLife

One new site is ThisLife. ThisLife finds and stores your photos from Facebook, your hard drive, Instagram, Twitter, iPhone, and other places. It uses cloud storage. Anytime you upload a photo to Facebook or any other place it is automatically uploaded to ThisLife as well.

At ThisLife the photos are organized into a timeline. Photos can be tagged for searching by name, event, date, activity and place.

You do not organize your ‘library’. You organize the Timeline. They are using the search function to find ‘moments’ or photos.

ThisLife is free for up to 1000 photos. You can store up to 20,000 photos for $8 a month and 50,000 photos for $15.00 a month.

SnapJoy

Another new option is SnapJoy. SnapJoy also finds your photos from all over the Internet and from external hard drives and even your camera's memory card. When you open an account at SnapJoy, you begin by uploading photos from Picasa, Flickr, your camera, and so on.

All of your Flickr sets and Picasa albums will be kept intact, and your Instagram photos are stuffed into its own album automatically. Snapjoy remembers what you’ve already imported, so you can repeat this process as often as you like without bringing over duplicates.

The service uses Amazon cloud storage. Everything you store there is private by default. You're given a username.snapjoy.com URL for the images you choose to make public. The library displays in a timeline.

It's free to get started with SnapJoy, but at some point there will be fees instituted. These amounts are not given on the website.

Google+, iCloud, and Flickr

These next three cloud storage systems don't offer help to aggregate and collect your images. But they do provide cloud storage.

If you've used Picasa Web Albums, getting those photos into Google+ is easy, and the photos are displayed beautifully there.

iCloud stores photos in the cloud for 30 days, during which time they are supposed to be synced to your own devices. In my opinion, this misses the point of cloud storage as a backup for the various forms of catastrophe that might strike your hardware.

Flickr is still very much alive and running, although some people have worried about its fate because Yahoo! isn't as dominant as it once was. Personally, I have almost 4000 photos on Flickr and have no plans to move them elsewhere. Flickr is only about $25 a year, which is a terrific bargain, but it does not have the aggregation features of ThisLife and SnapJoy.

Should I decide to move my photos from Flickr, a site like ThisLife or SnapJoy would be a perfect choice because both offer features to bring in photos from other sources as well. If you're not set up with a home for all your photos yet, these two new services are worth a comparison shopping look from you.